CHAPTER III.

ALL night long he was absent.

The old serving woman, terrified in so far as her dull brutish nature could
be roused to fear, did what she knew, what she dared. She raised the little
wounded naked creature, and carried her to her own pallet bed; restored her
to consciousness by such rude means as she had knowledge of, and staunched
the flow of blood.

She did all this harshly, as it was her custom to do all things, and without
tenderness or even pity, for the sight of this stranger was unwelcome to
her, and she also had guessed the message of that unread letter.

The child had been stunned by the blow, and she had lost some blood, and was
weakened and stupefied and dazed; yet there seemed to her rough nurse no
peril for her life, and by degrees she fell into a feverish, tossing
slumber, sobbing sometimes in her sleep, and crying perpetually on the
unknown name of Phratos.

The old woman Pitchou stood and looked at her. She, who had always known the
true story of the disappearance which some had called death and some had
deemed a divine interposition, had seen before that transparent brown skin,
those hues in cheeks and lips like the carnation leaves, that rich, sun‐fed,
dusky beauty, those straight dark brows.

“She is his sure enough,” she muttered. “He was the first with Reine Flamma.
I wonder has he been the last.”

And she went down the stairs chuckling, as the low human brute will at any
evil thought.

The mastiff stayed beside the child.

She went to the fire and threw more wood one, and sat down again to her
spinning‐wheel, and span and dozed, and span and dozed again.

She was not curious: to her, possessing that thread to the secret of the
past, which her master and her townsfolk had never held, it all seemed
natural. It was an old, old story; there had been thousands like it; it was
only strange because Reine Flamma had been held a saint.

page: 27

The hours passed on; the lamp paled, and its flame at last died out; in the
loft above, where the dog watched, there was no sound; the old woman
slumbered undisturbed, unless some falling ember of the wood aroused
her.

She was not curious, nor did she care how the child fared. She had led that
deadening life of perpetual labour and of perpetual want in which the human
animal becomes either a machine or a devil. She was a machine; put to what
use she might be—to spin flax, to card wool, to wring a pigeon’s throat, to
bleed a calf to death, to bake or stew, to mumble a prayer or drown a
kitten, it was all one to her. If she had a preference it might be for the
office that hurt some living thing; but she did not care; all she heeded was
whether she had pottage enough to eat at noonday, and the leaden effigy of
her Mary safe round her throat at night.

The night went on, and passed away; one gleam of dawn shone through a round
hole in the shutter; she wakened with a start to find the sun arisen, and
the fire dead upon the hearth.

She shook herself and stamped her chill feet upon the bricks, and tottered on
her feeble way, with frozen body, to the house door. She drew it slowly
open, and saw by the light of the sun that it had been for some time
morning.

The earth was everywhere thick with snow; a hoar frost sparkled over all the
branches; great sheets of ice were whirled down the rapid mill‐stream; in
one of the leafless boughs a robin sang, and beneath the bough a cat was
crouched, waiting with hungry eager eyes, patient even in its famished
impatience.

Dull as her sympathy was, and slow her mind, she started as she saw her
master there.

Claudis Flamma was at work; the rough, hard, rude toil which he spared to
himself no more than to those who were his hirelings. He was carting wood;
going to and fro with huge limbs of trees that men in youth would have found
it a severe task to move; he was labouring breathlessly, giving himself no
pause, and the sweat was on his brow, although he trod ankle deep in snow,
and although his clothes were heavy with icicles.

He did not see or hear her; she went up to him and
page: 28 called him by name; he started, and raised his
head and looked at her.

Dull though she was, she was in a manner frightened by the change upon his
face; it had been lean, furrowed, weather‐beaten always, but it was livid
now, with bloodshot eyes, and a bruised, broken, yet withal savage look that
terrified her. He did not speak, but gazed at her like a man recalled from
some drugged sleep back to the deeds and memories of the living world.

The old woman held her peace a few moments; then spoke out in her own blunt,
dogged fashion.

“Is she to stay?”

Her mind was not awake enough for any curiosity; she only cared to know if
the child stayed: only so much as would concern her soup kettle, her kneaded
dough, her spun hemp, her household labour.

He turned for a second with the gesture that a trapped fox may make, held
fast, yet striving to essay a death grip; then he checked himself, and gave
a mute sign of assent, and heaved up a fresh log of wood, and went on with
his labours, silently. She knew of old his ways too well to venture to ask
more. She knew, too, that when he worked like this, fasting and in silence,
there had been long and fierce warfare in his soul, and some great evil done
for which he sought to make atonement.

So she left him, and passed in to the house, and built up afresh her fire,
and swept her chamber out, and fastened up her round black pot to boil, and
muttered all the while,—

“Another mouth to feed; another breast to tend.”

And the thing was bitter to her; because it gave trouble and took food.

Now, what the letter had been, or who had deciphered it for him, Claudis
Flamma never told to any man; and from the little strange creature no
utterance could be ever got.

But the child who had come in the night and the snow tarried at
Yprès
Yprés
from that time thenceforward.

Claudis Flamma nourished, sheltered, clothed her; but he did all these
begrudgingly, harshly, scantily; and he did all these with an acrid hate and
scorn, which did not cease, but rather grew with time.

The blow which had been her earliest welcome was not the first that she
received from him by many; and whilst
page: 29 she
was miserable exceedingly, she showed it, not as children do, but rather
like some chained and untamed animal, in fearless stupor and in sudden,
sharp ferocity. And this the more because she spoke but a very few words of
the language of the people amongst whom she had been brought; her own tongue
was one full of round vowels and strange sounds, a tongue unknown to
them.

For many weeks he said not one word to her, cast not one look at her; he let
her lead the same life that was led by the beetles that crawled in the
timbers, or by the pigs that couched and were kicked in the straw. The woman
Pitchou gave her such poor scraps of garments or of victuals as she chose;
she could crouch in the corner of the hearth where the fire warmth reached;
she could sleep in the hay in the little loft under the roof; so much she
could do and no more.

After that first moment in which her vague appeal for pity and for rest had
been answered by the blow that struck her senseless, the child had never
made a moan, nor sought for any solace.

All the winter through she lay curled up on the tiles by the fence, with her
arms round the great body of the dog and his head upon her chest; they were
both starved, beaten, kicked, and scourged, with brutal words oftentimes;
they had the community of misfortune, and they loved one another.

The blow on her head, the coldness of the season, the scanty food that was
cast to her, all united to keep her brain stupefied and her body almost
motionless. She was like a young bear that is motherless, wounded, frozen,
famished, but which, coiled in an almost continual slumber, keeps its blood
flowing and its limbs alive. And, like the bear, with the spring she
awakened.

When the townsfolk and the peasants came to the mill, and first saw this
creature there, with her wondrous vivid hues, and her bronzed half‐naked
limbs, they regarded her in amazement, and asked the miller whence she came.
He set his teeth, and answered ever:

“The woman that bore her was Reine Flamma.”

The avowal was a penance set to himself, but to it he never added more; and
they feared his bitter temper and his caustic tongue too greatly to press it
on him, or even to
page: 30 ask him whether his
daughter were with the living or the dead.

With the unfolding of the young leaves, and the loosening of the frost‐bound
waters, and the unveiling of the violet and the primrose under the shadows
of the wood, all budding life revives, and so did hers. For she could escape
from the dead, cold, bitter atmosphere of the silent and loveless house,
where her bread was begrudged, and the cudgel was her teacher, out into the
freshness and the living sunshine of the young blossoming world, where the
birds and the beasts and the tender blue flowers and the curling green
boughs were her comrades, and where she could stretch her limbs in freedom,
and coil herself among the branches, and steep her limbs in the coolness of
waters, and bathe her aching feet in the moisture of rain‐filled
grasses.

With the spring she arose, the true forest animal she was; wild, fleet,
incapable of fear, sure of foot, in unison with all the things of the earth
and air, and stirred by them to a strange, dumb, ignorant, passionate
gladness.

She had been scarce seen in the winter; with the breaking of the year the
people from more distant places, who rode their mules down to mill on their
various errands, stared at this child and wondered amongst themselves
greatly, and at length asked Claudis Flamma whence she came.

He answered ever, setting hard his teeth:

“The woman that bore her was one accursed, whom men deemed a saint—Reine
Flamma.”

They dared not ask him more; for many were his debtors.

But when they went away, and gossiped amongst themselves by the wayside well
or under the awnings of the market stalls, they said to one another that it
was just as they had thought long ago; the creature had been no better than
her kind; and they had never credited the fable that God had taken her,
though they had humoured the miller because he was aged and in his dotage.
Whilst one old woman, a withered and witch‐like crone, who had toiled in
from the fishing village with a kreel upon her back and the smell of the sea
about her rags, heard, standing in the market‐place, and laughed, and mocked
them, these seers
page: 31 who were so wise after
the years had gone, and when the truth was clear.

“You knew, you knew, you knew!” she echoed, with a grin upon her face. “Oh
yes! you were so wise! Who, seven years through, said that Reine Flamma was
a saint, and taken by the saints into their keeping? And who hissed at me
for a foul‐mouthed crone when I said that the devil had more to do with her
than the good God, and that the black‐browed gipsy, with jewels for eyes in
his head, like the toad, was the only master to whom she gave herself?
Oh‐hè, you were so wise!”

She mocked them, and they were ashamed, and held their peace; well knowing
that indeed no creature amongst them had ever been esteemed so pure, so
chaste, and so honoured of heaven as had been the miller’s daughter.

Many remembered the “gipsy with the jewelled eyes,” and was those brilliant,
fathomless, midnight eyes reproduced in the small rich face of the child
whom Reine Flamma, as her own father said, had borne in shame whist they had
been glorifying her apotheosis. And it came to be said, as time went on,
that this unknown stranger had been the fiend himself, taking human shape
for the destruction of one pure soul, and the confusion of all true children
of the church.

Legend and tradition still held fast their minds in this remote, ancient, and
priest‐ridden place; in their belief the devil was still a living power,
traversing the earth and air in search of souls, and not seldom triumphing:
of metaphor or myth they were not ignorant; Satan to them was a personality,
terrific, and oftentimes irresistible, assuming at will shapes grotesque or
awful, human or spiritual. Their forefathers had beheld him; why not
they?

So the henhucksters and poulterers, the cider makers and tanners, the
fisherfolk from the sea‐board, and the peasant proprietors from the country
round, came at length in all seriousness to regard the young child at
Yprès
Yprés
as a devil‐born thing. “She was hell‐begotten,” they would mutter,
when they saw her; and they would cross themselves, and avoid her if they
could.

The time had gone by, unhappily, as they considered, when men had been
permitted to burn such creatures as this; they knew it and were sorry for
it; the world, they
page: 32 thought, had been
better when Jews had blazed like torches, and witches had crackled like
firewood; such treats were forbidden now, they knew, but many, for all that,
thought within themselves that it was a pity it should be so, and that it
was mistaken mercy in the age they lived in which forbade the purifying of
the earth by fire of such as she.

In the winter time, when they first saw her, unusual floods swept the
country, and destroyed much of their property; in the spring which followed
there were mildew and sickness everywhere: in the summer there was a long
drought, and by consequence there came a bad harvest, and great suffering
and scarcity.

There were not a few in the district who attributed all these woes to the
advent of the child of darkness, and who murmured openly in their huts and
homesteads that no good would befall them so long as this offspring of hell
were suffered in their midst.

Since, however, the time was past when the broad market‐place could have been
filled with a curious, breathless, eager crowd, and the grey cathedral have
grown red in the glare of flames fed by a young living body, they held their
hands from doing her harm, and said these things only in their own
ingle‐nooks, and contented themselves with forbidding their children to
consort with her, and with drawing their mules to the other side of the road
when they met her. They did not mean to be cruel; they only acted in their
own self‐defence, and dealt with her as their fellow‐countrymen dealt with a
cagote—“only.”

Hence, when, with the reviving year the child’s dulled brain awakened, and
all the animal activity in her sprang into vigorous action, she found
herself shunned, marked, and glanced at with averted looks of mingled dread
and scorn. “A daughter of the devil!” she heard again and again muttered as
they passed her; she grew to take shelter in this repute as in a fortress,
and to be proud, with a savage pride, of her imputed origin.

It made her a little fierce, mute, fearless, reckless, all‐daring, and all
enduring animal. An animal in her ferocities, her mute instincts, her
supreme patience, her physical perfectness of body and of health. Perfect of
shape and hue; full of force to resist; ignorant either of hope or fear;
de‐
page: 33 siring only one thing, liberty;
with no knowledge, but with unerring instinct.

She was at an age when happier creatures have scarce escaped from their
mother’s arms; but she had not even thus early a memory of her mother, and
she had been shaken off to live or die, to fight or famish, as a young fox
whose dam has been flung to the hounds is driven away to starve in the
winter woods, or save himself, if he have strength, by slaughter.

She was a tame animal only in one thing:—she took blows uncomplainingly, and
as though comprehending that they were her inevitable portion.

“The child of the devil!” they said. In a dumb, half unconscious fashion,
this five‐year‐old creature wondered sometimes why the devil had not been
good enough to give her a skin that would not feel, and veins that would not
bleed.

She had always been beaten ever since her birth; she was beaten here; she
thought it a law of life, as other children think it such to have their
mother’s kiss and their daily food and nightly prayer.

Claudis Flamma did after his manner his duty by her. She was to him a thing
accursed, possessed, loathsome, imbued with evil from her origin; but he did
what he deemed his duty. He clothe her, if scantily; he fed her, if
meagrely; he lashed her with all the caustic gibes that came naturally to
his tongue; he set her hard tasks to keep her from idleness; he beat her
when she did not, and not seldom when she did, them. He dashed holy water on
her many times; and used a stick to her without mercy.

After this light he did his duty. That he should hate her, was to fulfil a
duty also in his eyes; he had always been told that it was right to abhor
the things of darkness; and to him she was a thing of utter darkness, a
thing born of the black ruin of a stainless soul, begotten by the pollution
and corruption of an infernal tempter.

He never questioned her as to her past—that short past, like the span of an
insect’s life, which yet had sufficed to gift her with passions, with
instincts, with desires, even with memories,—in a word, with character:—a
character he could neither change nor break; a thing formed already, for
good or for evil, abidingly.

page: 34

He never spoke to her except in sharp irony or in curt command. He set her
hard tasks of bodily labour which she did not dispute, but accomplished so
far as her small strength lay, with a mute dogged patience, half ferocity,
half passiveness.

In those first winter days of her arrival he called her Folle‐Farine; taking
the most worthless, the most useless, the most abject, the most despised
thing he knew in all his daily life from which to name her; and the name
adhered to her, and was the only one by which she was ever known.

Folle‐Farine!—as one may say, the Dust.

In time she grew to believe that it was really hers; even as in time she
began to forget that strange, deep, rich tongue in which she had babbled her
first words, and to know no other tongue than the Norman‐French about
her.

Yet in her there existed imagination, tenderness, gratitude, and a certain
wild and true nobility, though the old man Flamma would never have looked
for them, never have believed in them. She was devil born: she was of devil
nature in his eyes.

Upon his mill‐ditch, foul and fœtid, refuse would sometimes gather, and
receiving the seed of the lily, would give birth to blossoms born stainless
out of corruption: but the allegory had no meaning for him. Had any one
pointed it out to him he would have taken the speaker into his orchard, and
said:

“Will the crab bear a fruit not bitter? Will the nightshade give out
sweetness and honey? Fool!—as the stem so the branch, as the sap so the
blossom.”